Josh Kushner
speaker
255 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Josh Kushner’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
To continue the real estate analogy, at the earliest stages, I always say to her, for the metropolitan folks listening to this podcast, we're going to Jersey City. 10 years ago, we're going to Astoria, we're going to Williamsburg, we're going to Bed-Stuy. Sometimes we'll get those neighborhoods right way before anyone else, and sometimes we won't.
But our ambition is to be in those neighborhoods way before anyone else has moved there and really dream of what they can be way before the rest of the market identifies them.
It has less to do with revenue or valuation. It has more to do with how the end consumer or the end customer feels about the product. And we talked a little bit about our orientation around approaching our investments with a consumer lens. A lot of people at the firm have an incredibly creative side to them. In some respects, there's like an artistic orientation of a lot of people at the firm.
I think as we think about what is a premier company, a lot of it has to do with the quality of the product in the eyes of those that are actually using that product. That is how we identify what Fifth Avenue is. Consumers or enterprises can change, but I think there's a level of love
four products that we've invested in where the switching costs are so high as a result of how the end customer thinks about them.
You need to be so all in on the idea that you're willing to kind of bet the farm in some respects, no compromises. I think other mistakes I've made is every time that the firm has ever sized down a position based on our perception of risk, it's never led to an extraordinary outcome. And we try our best to identify these things. Stripe just raised a large round.
We felt fortunate to be a part of it. We put a billion seven five between us and our partners into the company. I can't think of a better business model and a more extraordinary team for us to have the opportunity to invest in a very deep way.
So I think the best way to answer that question would be to talk about my experience at Goldman Sachs. So I started my career in the summer of 2008. I showed up at the office one Saturday night just to get ahead of the week and Many of those that I was reporting to were in the office. I asked them what they were working on.
They said that they were underwriting all of Lehman Brothers' real estate assets. I asked if they needed help. I was just a couple of weeks into the job, but did my best to support them in whatever way I could. This group that I was a part of ultimately decided that it made sense to pass on buying Lehman's assets. And the next day, Lehman announced that it was going under.
And I had this true appreciation in that moment. I remember getting home Sunday night, knowing what was coming on Monday morning and feeling like the world was gonna change in a very dramatic way. And it did. And I remember a couple months later, I was in the office the day after Thanksgiving. I was working on something. I think I was the only person there.
And I remember calling my father to see how his day was going. And I said to him, dad, you think the world has changed forever and has lied to me, which stuck with me. And I think really has led to a lot of our thinking around investing is the world doesn't end very often. There are cycles and it's important to understand where you are in the cycle.
I think the things to appreciate though in this moment, you want to run to something when everyone else is running away. I think we have definitely tried our best to do that in this moment. as the market is facing the volatility that it's facing, we kind of try our best to take a step back and say, do we believe in the fundamentals of the space that we're working in?
Do we believe that the long-term trends associated with technology innovation are going to move in a very particular direction? Do we believe in this group of exceptional founders that we've had the opportunity to partner with? Do we believe in their products and their positioning? If so, lean in when others are leaning away.
And it's scary to run into a burning building when everyone else is running away. I think those that I respect the most have benefited tremendously in their careers when they've done the exact same thing.
I thought it was brilliant. Daniel, someone that I respect a ton, actually invested in his first company out of YC. And Nat took over GitHub after it was sold to Microsoft. All of these AI companies just need compute. They said, here you go. Their orientation is, hey, we can give you money or we can just give you compute. And naturally, that's going to lead to them investing in these companies.
But it's just brilliant. Constantly thinking about why are things done a certain way? Going back to our conversation around the ways in which the industry has existed, I think there are some beautiful aspects to the ways in which the industry has existed.
But my hope is that as a firm, we're constantly questioning those things and pushing the boundaries no differently than our companies with the main goal of being how do we actually serve our customer and our customer is our founders. If we're constantly pushing the boundaries around ways in which we can do that, then I'll be happy that we're questioning the rules.
Sure. So Thrive sold in January a 3% stake to a group of five individuals. Bob Iger, who's the CEO of Disney. Mukesh Ambani is the founder of Reliance. Xavier Niel, who's prolific French entrepreneur and investor. George Apollo Lemon, who started 3G and has run and operated many extraordinary businesses. And then Henry Kavras, who founded and scaled KKR.
The reason for the transaction was very much us as a group thinking in first principles around the reality that our best companies have cap tables. And they have cap tables with extraordinary investors, but also they have boards.
As the firm has scaled, the idea of actually having people who have built meaningful businesses and have operated meaningful businesses is something that we were very excited to have as a part of our organization.
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